Posted tagged ‘R&B’

You know, you’re right to say that Sam Phillips sure recorded a lot of good black and white artists down in Memphis in the 1950s.

The Fantastic Four

BUT – how the heck did he do it? What happened to musicians having to go to major music industry centres like Los Angeles or New York to get a start on their recording careers? For example, didn’t Ray Charles have to leave Seattle in just 1950 for California to get going on what would eventually culminate in Jamie Foxx getting famous and Kayne West shamelessly ripping him off?

The thing of it was, there were big changes to recording technology following World War II. And when an innovator like Sam Phillips came along to seize on untapped talent that was the Memphis region’s musicians, well, the rest is history.

3– Anywhere you stand in town you can see three people Ian Stewart taught how to play guitar.

An immensely important and influential musician and teacher in the Red Deer music milieu, Ian Stewart picked up his guitar and headed down to Michigan – the land of Motown, the MC5 and Iggy Pop and the Stooges. I sat down with Stewart in Internetland to discuss what it was like changing locations after being a regional fixture in Alberta for so long, and of course from there the conversation naturally goes from Eric Clapton to the heart of the economic recession.